Britney Spears, Joss Whedon, and Me

Britney Spears

Britney Spears’ first album dropped the year I turned 25, so I was already outside of her target demographic. That didn’t stop me from expounding my opinion, though. I told anyone who would listen that I considered her a malign influence on impressionable teenagers, that her artistry was negligible, and that I hated her debut single, “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”

That was a lie, though. Then and now, that song slaps.

The constant, on-demand immediacy of online life often deluges us with so much information, everything becomes meaningless. But occasionally, we get the kind of synchronicity that turns gibberish into insight. This happened this week, when battalions of Hollywood stars emerged, condemning Joss Whedon for running an autocratic media empire. Almost simultaneously, the documentary Framing Britney Spears aired, exposing how the media machine built her up, just to tear her down.

Though Whedon’s epoch-making Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted two years before Britney’s first album, they were virtual contemporaries. The 1990s weren’t the 1960s, when pop culture reinvented itself every eighteen months. Britney and Buffy shared an ethos that a young woman could be blow-dried and manicured, and still kick ass. Britney’s funky, danceable pop had a kick-drum urgency that could’ve been Buffy's stake driving home.

Yet we, the buying public, couldn’t have treated them more differently. Buffy in particular, and Whedon’s corpus generally, were already subject to serious critical scrutiny while the show was still on the air. He drew praise for his artistry, his writing, and his Male Feminist ideals. Even when his “BDSM fantasy gone wrong” series Dollhouse went sideways, it was still considered empowering to watch sexy women punch back.

With Britney, however, we constantly brayed for her to screw up. We mocked her for wearing provocative clothes but claiming to be a virgin, as though teenagers never tried to shock through prurience before. We pooh-poohed a seventeen-year-old for not recording songs forty-somethings wanted to hear. We speculated aloud about her sex life when she was still, technically, underage, turning ourselves into de facto child pornographers.

And when I say “we,” I mean me. As I’ve written recently, I spent half my teens and most of my twenties trying, with mixed success, to convince older adults that I was already their peer. This included ostentatiously disliking anything too new, popular, or fun. Britney made an easy target. She was so thoroughly, explicitly young, that disparaging her instantly burnished my “grumpy old man” credentials.

Joss Whedon

I wouldn’t dare admit, even to myself, that she looked like fun. She was attractive, high-spirited, and impetuous, all things I didn’t let myself be. In public, I joined the jeering masses, disparaging her as unoriginal, lightweight, and fake. In private, I wondered how she felt about somewhat older men.

Certainly, we now know, her public persona was tightly controlled. In many ways, she was like Princess Diana, who weaponized the paparazzi in her battle with Prince Charles, then couldn’t stop them. The media loved their pretty, glamorous Princess, whether Diana or Britney, and fawned over her every move. But they also made bank every time she flipped her shit on camera.

Soon, they started trying to provoke the Princess into a public breakdown.

From very shortly after they became celebrities, Joss Whedon could do nothing wrong, while Britney Spears could do nothing right. They attracted largely the same audience, and had largely overlapping philosophy. But one, a middle-aged man born to Hollywood royalty, was considered sacrosanct, too pure to touch. The other, a teenage girl from Mississippi, beat the odds and became a star. And for that, she had to be punished.

Both artists’ best work is probably behind them. Whedon recently got fired from his first TV development deal since Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD in 2012, the last year Spears had a top-10 hit. A decade on, maybe it makes sense for mass culture to reevaluate their paired legacy. But it’s too late. We can’t rescind the abuse we, the buying public, subsidized whenever we gawked at Britney’s latest meltdown. Nor the abusive environment we subsidized in Whedon's studio.

Most important, though someone can hold Whedon accountable for how he treated subordinates, nobody will hold us, me, accountable for how we treated Britney. We have to live with the images of the ways she disfigured herself, to vicariously punish us. We did that to her, I did that to her, to punish her for the sin of being fun. Like all Grand Inquisitors, I must admit, I’m the sinner.